Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

Release Year: 1968

Language: Spanish with English subtitles

Starring: Daisy Granados, Eslinda Núñez, Omar Valdés, René de la Cruz, Sergio Corrieri

One of the first Cuban films to achieve significant success abroad, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s intimate and densely layered Memories of Underdevelopment is a landmark work of the country’s cinema. Left behind by his wife and family in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, the bourgeois intellectual Sergio (Corrieri) passes his days wandering Havana and idly reflecting, his amorous entanglements and political ambivalence gradually giving way to a mounting sense of alienation. With this adaptation of an innovative novel by Edmundo Desnoes, Gutiérrez Alea developed a cinematic style as radical as the times he was chronicling, creating a collage of vivid impressions through the use of experimental editing techniques, archival material, and spontaneously shot street scenes. More than fifty years after its release, in a stunning 4K restoration, Memories of Underdevelopment stands as a biting indictment of its protagonist’s disengagement, and an extraordinary glimpse of life in postrevolutionary Havana. – Janus Films